Group items tagged

The chief economist at Google , Hal Varian, has given an interesting little speech looking into the economics of the newspaper industry. No, they're not entirely doomed, as some think, but they do need some changes. Most importantly, it would be good if we all read them for a little longer while at work each day. The general points made are all entirely reasonable: most of us who have been reading about this subject will know many of them already. Newspaper circulation has been in decline for decades, it's not just the internet. News was never what made the money, it was the advertising in the other parts of the paper that did. The battle is really about, whether online or offline, gaining access to some fragment of our attention span. Gain that and the industry can still be profitable and so on. All good points. But the two that were new to me

This article gives us a possible outlook on the future of online newspaper websites. Video journalism is an emerging trend, and it provides greater economical benefits from its advertisements than regular web based ads. This can help move some forms of online news from paywalls to being "free to the public", since they make up for profits with advertisements.

This article from State of the Media gives many different statistics about how the newspaper industry is holding up nowadays. The majority of these statistics are graphs showing how advertisement revenue is increasing and decreasing based upon it being online / print. Most of this information is from 1990 to present day.

A really good, short article with lots of current statistics.